They are our work, but not always our exclusive property. Wherever food is amassed, consumers flock from the four corners of the sky; they invite themselves to the copious feast; and, the richer the victuals, the greater their numbers. Man, who alone is capable of provoking agrarian luxuriance, becomes by this very fact the giver of an immense banquet whereat legions of guests take their places. By creating more palatable and more generous victuals, he willy-nilly summons to his granaries thousands and thousands of famished creatures against whose teeth his prohibitions battle in vain. The more he produces, the larger tribute he has to pay. Big crops and sumptuous hoards favour the insects, our rivals as consumers. It is the prevailing law. Nature offers her mighty breast with equal zeal to all her children, to those who live by others’ goods no less than to the producers. For us who plough and sow and reap, wearing ourselves out with toil, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also for the little Corn-weevil, who, though exempted from the labour of the fields, will nevertheless settle in our granaries and with her pointed beak nibble the heap of corn, grain by grain, to the husk. For us who dig and weed and water, bent with fatigue and burnt by the heat of the day, nature swells the pea-pods; she swells them also for the Pea-weevil, who, doing no gardener’s work, will all the same take her share of the crop at her own time, when the earth is joyful with the new life of spring. Let us watch the actions of this zealous tax-collector, who levies her tithes in green peas. I, a well-meaning rate-payer, will let her have her way: it is precisely for her benefit that I have sown a few rows of the beloved plant in my enclosure. With no other invitation from me than this modest seed-plot, she arrives punctually in the course of May. She has learnt that in this stony soil, unfitted for market-gardening, peas are flourishing for the first time. And she has hastened thither to exercise her privileges as an entomological revenue-officer. Whence does she come? It is impossible to say exactly. She has come from some refuge or other where she has spent the winter in a state of torpor. The plane-tree, which strips itself of its own initiative during the heat of summer, furnishes excellent shelters for homeless paupers under its patches of loose-hanging bark. I have often found our Pea-thief in one of these winter sanctuaries. Sheltered under the dead covering of the plane, or otherwise protected while the winter raged, she woke from her slumbers at the first kisses of a kindly sun. The almanac of the instincts has taught her; she knows as well as the gardener when the peas are in flower, and she comes to her plant more or less from every direction, ambling at a slow pace, but swift in flight.